It is difficult to deal with a narcissist when you are a grown, independent, fully functioning adult. The children of narcissists have an especially difficult burden, for they lack the knowledge, power, and resources to deal with their narcissistic parents without becoming their victims. Whether cast into the role of Scapegoat or Golden Child, the Narcissist's Child never truly receives that to which all children are entitled: a parent's unconditional love. Start by reading the 46 memories--it all began there.

Sunday, November 20, 2016

When I tried to respond, the mail bounced back, so it qualifies as a "drive by"--an attack from someone who is ensuring that s/he will receive no information that might pry open their shuttered little mind and inject something contrary to what they have decided is the truth.

In the FB group I regularly remind people that in seeking support, you must also seek truth. Many ACoNs believe that their Ns intentionally targeted them, that their behaviours were for the purpose of hurting them. But in most cases, this simply is not the case: Ns are self-focussed and their behaviours are intended to advantage themselves--if you happen to get hurt as a result, that is fallout, not their intent. Yes, they lack empathy and don't care that you are hurt, but they didn't spend your tuition money on a new Louis Vuitton bag for the purpose of hurting you, they did it because they wanted the bag and there was all that money, not yet spent...

Yes, you were treated badly and you deserve--and should seek--support for that. But supporting your feelings, acknowledging you were ill treated and hurt, is different from assigning a reason for a person's behaviour. To heal, you have to seek the truth and embrace it, even if it is contrary to what you want to believe.

My drive-by correspondent has received information from a person who is angry with me, a person who has not told the truth. My drive-by correspondent doesn't want the truth because she has denied me the opportunity to respond. So here is what my bounced-back email said:

"There are two sides to every story. You reveal your character by accepting one without ever hearing the other."

Thursday, November 17, 2016

“You are not who you
say you are. You do not live in South Africa. You live at 3126 Oak Road, #420,
Walnut Creek, CA 94597 from 10/13 to present since you are divorcing Eric H.
Janssen. Your home was foreclosed on 7/27/15 and sold by trustee sald 15-12800.
Original loan $365, 500 10/28/94, parcel 149-304-026-3 with transfer value
$214,000 for a 1,162 sq.ft., 3 br, 1 bath home built in 1947. You are do not
have a narcissist daughter or son. You have a minor child living with your ex.
You have 4 traffic offenses in Contra Costa, CA. I could go on. You get the
point. Either take this fake blog with lies down or I will post all this
information and anything else I may have in my possession on the internet for
everyone to see. You also need to close your FB group The Narcissist's Child or
I will reveal your ruse to the world! You messed with the wrong people this time.”

I—and this blog—and the Facebook group—have been targeted by
an internet troll.

This troll has taken my Facebook screen name, done an
internet search on it, and found some hapless woman in California with the same
name—but for her it is her real name—and
decided to “blackmail” me with the information found in the search.

Anybody who has been around this blog—or the Facebook group—for
any period of time knows that I use a screen name. I started with the name
Sweet Violet back in the mid-90s as a tribute to my grandmothers: one, actually
named Violet, died in 1992; the other, who collected Japanese post-War china in
the Sweet Violets pattern (of which I am now the proud owner), died in 1994.
Sweet Violet as a screen name seemed a fitting honour to them both. Unfortunately, I woke
up one morning a year or two back to find that Facebook had frozen my account
and would not thaw it out until I gave them a real-sounding name: they weren’t
buying “Sweet” as a first name or “Violet” as a surname (they should visit
South Africa where you can meet people with names like “Education January”).
Since everybody on line knew me as Violet at this time, I opted to keep Violet
as my first name and added, for a surname, the name of a street near where I
was living at the time…and like magic, my FB account was restored and I was
back!

One of the problems narcissists have is an inability to see
beyond what they perceive: if they believe it, it must be true because they
cannot be wrong. This is a form of arrogance, for which narcissists are well
known. My troll, labouring under the delusion that her perception was truth,
obviously spent a great deal of time and effort—and possibly even some money—to
find out the “truth” about who I am. Unfortunately, she found some poor woman
in California whose real name is the same as my screen name—and who seems to be
having a real tough time of it just now—and has convinced herself that the
California Violet is me…and that by having all this internet-generated
information about that Violet, she has some kind of power over me.

I tried to respond to the email, to set the troll straight with
some truth, but the troll used a Gmail email address that no longer exists. I am
guessing she opened the email account, made her attack, then closed the
account. This is what I call a “drive by”—a person spits out a malicious message
then takes an action that prevents the target from responding. It is designed
to prevent the other person from providing information that might run contrary
to what the attacker believes: it ensures that not a single grain of truth
might penetrate the attacker’s self-righteous—but incorrect—beliefs. It is also
designed to frustrate the victim by depriving him of a means of defence and to
make sure that any witnesses (usually members of the attacker’s crew) don’t get
infected with truth from the victim.

What kind of person does this? Somebody who simply cannot be
wrong. Somebody who is petty, spiteful and vindictive. Somebody who doesn’t
care about truth, only about creating the illusion that she is right, even when
she knows, deep in her heart, that she is wrong. By utterly destroying her
victim, the troll wipes out any chance that a) anybody ever finds out she is
wrong and b) she might have to acknowledge that she is wrong—because acknowledging
she is wrong destroys her self-perception and makes her vulnerable.

Anyway, I tried to set the troll
straight lest she do some harm to the California Violet, so I sent this email
and it bounced back: “Apparently
it hasn't occurred to you that 1) there might be more than one Violet Janssen
on the planet and 2) Violet Janssen might not be my real name.

This is a perfect example of how internet research
can lead you to faulty conclusions. It exemplifies everything that is wrong
with believing everything you read and how an otherwise rational person can be
led to absurdly false and embarrassingly incorrect conclusions. This is how
anti-vax people get sucked into junk science: they start with a faulty premise
and then seek information (regardless of the validity of the source) to support
it rather than seek to discover the truth—which might be contrary to the premise
they are trying to validate—through bona fide sources. If you start with a
false premise and then seek to prove it, no amount of information can truly
validate it because the initial premise is false in the first place. And that
is exactly where you have gone wrong here: you have started with a false
premise and all of the time and effort you have put into your research has
brought you to an incorrect conclusion.

I hope you realize that the behaviour you are
exhibiting is spiteful, vindictive, and narcissistic in nature. If you aren't
seeing a therapist right now, I recommend that you do so. If you ARE seeing a
therapist, I recommend that you tell him/her what you have done and discuss it
and your need for vengefulness. And if you feel reluctant to do so or you are
indignant at my suggestion (because how dare I suggest that you might be wrong!),
I strongly recommend that you explore that reaction because that means you know
your behaviour is wrong but you are unwilling to acknowledge it...another
behaviour common to narcissists.

Just a word of warning, though—if you
try to take any action against the Violet Janssen in Walnut Creek who,
according to your research seems to be pretty hard up against it anyway—you
could be committing a crime. She doesn't know who you are or why you would be
targeting her and if you are in a different state, your crime could be federal
in nature (because it crosses state lines). Don't let your arrogance lead you
to believe what is not true: that you have found the “real” Violet and have
acquired the power to destroy her.

I would like to thank you for this email
and your threat because I have been searching for a topic for my next blog
entry and here you are, handing it to me on a silver platter! Blackmail only
works when the target has something to hide...and I do not.

Hugs and love,

Violet”

So, by now everybody has to be wondering what prompted the
troll attack. The last sentence in the email to me gives the clue: “You messed with the wrong people this time.”
This clearly references some interaction between me and the troll (“people”
instead of “person”—the troll is puffing up like a cat to make herself look
bigger and more intimidating). It comes from a recent dust-up in the Facebook
group.

Membership in the group is by invitation only. You get an
invitation by contacting me and demonstrating to me why you would be a suitable
member of the group. I do this because I get lots and lots of requests from
people who are not ACoNs, people who have a narc sibling or boss or ex or
neighbour, people who are narcs themselves and are butthurt that their adult
kid had gone NC, narcs who perceive themselves victims, and even Lookie-Lous—people
who get their jollies through the pain of others. These people have to be screened
out to maintain the integrity of the group. Once past that, each potential
member is emailed a copy of the group Boundaries indicating the basic rules of
the group: confidentiality, respect, taboo topics (and the reasons they are
taboo), etc. An invitation to join is conditional on accepting and agreeing to
abide by the Boundaries. So, every person in the group presumably knows the
rules and has agreed to observe them before being granted entry—and a copy is
posted in the group Files section if anyone needs to refresh their memories.

One of the things the Boundaries limits is recommendations
to members of the group. While there are no limitations on what a member may believe
or practice in her private life, there are limits as to what can be brought to
the group. Specific to this prohibition is such things as junk science,
alternative medicine, and other modalities that are not scientifically
validated. Again, if you think detoxing your eyelashes with blue paint enemas
works for you—go for it. But don’t bring it to the group. Another Boundary has
to do with privacy and confidentiality: if you violate the Boundaries or if you
have an issue with a Boundary, that is to be a private issue between the member
and me. Nobody should be publicly embarrassed by the group leader announcing
that Suzie Queue has broken a rule and needs to get her shit together: that is public
humiliation and Suzie’s counselling/reprimand are none of the rest of the group’s
business. And people are free to dislike the Boundaries but that is not a topic
for the group because it is a distraction from the main focus of healing from
the legacy of being raised by narcissists. Boundary discussions are supposed to
be private with me and, if you can present me with good reasons for changing a
boundary, I will consider it.

A member violated the rules. I sent her a message asking her
to remove a prohibited reference. She ignored me so I removed her post (FB
doesn’t allow me to edit other people’s posts, so in such a circumstance, I can
only delete the whole post). This prompted additional rules violations and
considerable lashing out. We had a Private Message (PM) conversation in which
it became abundantly clear that the member believed some conspiracy theories
and held her own internet “research” to be superior to the research done in
bona fide studies and published in peer-reviewed journals. And she became quite
indignant at my refutations of her beliefs in both the conspiracies and the
junk science (I reiterate--that was ALL done privately so the member was not exposed to any kind of embarrassment in the group).

While I was asleep here on the other side of the planet,
this member violated yet another rule, the one against recruiting members of
the group for anything and she specifically stated she was timing her message
to hit the group while I was asleep and could not delete it for several hours. She
then deleted herself from the group and blocked me on Facebook, taking a few
witnesses who were also junk science believers with her, one of whom had had a similar tête-a- tête
with me some months earlier. This member was angry because I refused to
endorse her pet alternative modality and accused me of “secrecy” (implying
nefarious intent on my part) for the privacy policy.

But leaving in a high dudgeon and dragging those few
acolytes with her wasn’t enough. She began sending emails and PMs to members of
the Narcissist’s Child group, trying to recruit them for a new group she was
forming. This prompted a flurry of email and PMs to me from angry and alarmed
group members, complaining about the rules violations. It was clear that she
was intent upon on destroying the group.

So why is she so angry that she is out to destroy me and the
blog and the group? Because somebody who has credibility could see right
through her and would not allow her to violate the boundaries with impunity.
Because somebody said “no” and made it stick. Because she was unable to come to
a way to be in control…and that is what she is still trying to do…get control
because when she is not in control, she is vulnerable. The big narcissistic
rage has two reasons: 1) to intimidate and 2) to vent her frustration at being
unable to prevail. She is afraid: she is projecting that I will do to her the
same kind of thing she is trying to do to me: to silence her and, in doing
that, take away her power—and without power, she feels vulnerable and afraid. And
only by taking away my voice in this blog and in the Facebook group does she
feel safe from the retaliatory attack she is sure will come.

At some point she must have taken the prohibition against
voicing junk science in the group as a prohibition to mean she cannot believe what she
wants; that, or she decided that she is not bound by the Boundaries, that
somehow she and her message were sufficiently important that it was ok to
violate them. But at no time is any member ever prohibited from believing
whatever they want to believe in their lives outside the group…the only
limitation is what is brought into the group. Think about it this way…if you
are invited to the home of a non-smoker, is it appropriate for you to light up
in their living room? Or do you respect their house rules and refrain from
smoking in their home? Does this mean you cannot smoke in your own home or car?
Obviously they have a bias against smoking…does it mean they have a bias
against you, personally?

And if you light that cigarette in their house anyway and
they ask you to either put it out or leave, are they out of line for enforcing
their house rules? Or are you out of line for violating them? What if you take
the attitude that your belief that you have a right to smoke wherever you want,
even in the home of a person who clearly does not like it—what if you think
their rules in their home don’t apply to you? Well, that is absolutely textbook
narcissistic behaviour, to believe that you are the exception, that you are so
special that you are exempt from the same rules that apply to everyone else.

The troll failed: out of nearly 300 members in the group,
fewer than 2% left and many of those who left emailed to tell me they were leaving due
to the instability the troll had caused, not because they were following her.
Expecting a mass rebellion, the troll got a few disgruntled or easily swayed
souls and nothing more. Obviously this was unsatisfactory and did not satisfy
her desire for vengeance or her need to silence me, so Phase 2 was launched: internet
blackmail.

The only problem, however, is that for blackmail to work the
blackmailee has to have something to hide and I don’t.

So here it is: this is what the troll plans to use to
destroy my credibility on the web. The only problem here is that my real name
isn’t Violet Janssen and that has never been a secret.

FYI--the troll cannot appear on this blog: all comments to the blog are moderated so you don't need to worry about the troll attacking here.

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Facebook Group!

The Narcissist's Child now has a Facebook group dedicated to helping adults who had narcissistic parents or parental figures: this group is not suitable for children or for the parents of children whose other parent is a narcissist. Unless you or your spouse had a narcissistic parent, this group will not be the right place for you.

Because the group is classified as a "secret" group, nobody can find it on a Facebook search, so your name and membership are completely confidential.

I personally monitor the group daily. No narcs, trolls, or manipulation/attacks are allowed, and anyone who engages in that kind of behaviour will have to leave the group. The objective is to create a safe place where you can talk to each other (and me) in privacy about the journey from victim to victor.

Unfortunately, spambots have figured away around the Captcha filter that my email app uses and the maker of the app has ignored my requests to make it more robust. I was only allowed 100 emails per month--I am writing this on the 10th of the month and spam has already taken more than 85 of my alloted emails: I have had to remove the email app because the volume of spam is taking all of the emails, leaving none for you. I am currently looking for another email app and when it is installed, I will revise this notice. Until then, however, there is no way to reach me via email.PLEASE DISREGARD THE INFORMATION BELOW UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

If you would like to join, send me an email using the form at the bottom of this page (do NOT use the comment section because that will publish your email address for the world to see) telling me a little about yourself and your experiences with narcissistic parents or parental figures and why you wish to join the group and I will get back to you.

Please double-check that you have included your CORRECT email address...I reply to every request I receive, so if you don't get a reply (and my reply hasn't been dumped into your spam or junkmail folder), that is your first clue that I don't have a correct email address to reach you. Please note, however, that I process requests only on Mondays, so if you don't hear back right away, don't panic...wait for next Monday!

Welcome to The Narcissist's Child, Facebook Edition!

Who Am I?

I am the adult daughter of a Malignant Narcissist mother (MNM). You may call me Violet.

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Want to email me?

No more email--

Unfortunately, spambots have figured out a way to bypass the Captcha in the email app I have been using and the maker of the app has ignored my requests for them to make it more robust. The maker of the app only allows me 100 emails per month and it is only the 10th of the month and spam has already sucked up more than 75 of those emails. I have had to remove the email app as a result--nothing was getting through but spam.

Comments on the blog are not affected but comments lack the privacy of email so please don't include any contact information in your comments.

I am on the lookout for a new email app to replace this one but until I find one, there is no email contact on this blog due to people who don't care if their spam annoys or otherwise causes issues for others. It only takes a few selfish individuals to spoil it for everyone.

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Disclaimer and Terms of Use

The Narcissist's Child contains my experiences as the child of a malignant narcissist and my understanding of the disorder. It is an attempt to describe and demonstrate the dynamics of a relationship with a malignant narcissist, particularly a malignant narcissist mother, to people who have little or no experience with the disorder, those who have been left reeling by the unexpected repercussions of being involved with a narcissist, and for those who, having been involved with one, need the support that come from knowing that you are not alone.

I am not a mental health professional and nothing on The Narcissist's Child should be taken as an expert opinion. This are my experiences, perceptions, and opinions, nothing more. Nothing here is a substitute for the advice of or the diagnosis and treatment by, a mental health professional. Do not rely on information on this site as a substitute for the advice of a qualified mental health professional.

Some links on this site lead to information or resources maintained by third parties. The Narcissist's Child makes no representations as to accuracy, integrity or any other aspect of the linked resources: use at your own risk.

Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the innocent and guilty alike (and to rob the narcissists of the glory of seeing their names or stories in print).

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